The Illinois Railway Museum is excited to announce that fundraising has begun to move Milwaukee Road Buffeteria Diner 126 to the museum. Our fundraising goal is $25,000. Details on the car are on the GoFundMe page. Thank you for considering a donation to help preserve a part of Milwaukee Road history.
Donations are being accepted through the museum's website:
The link to IRM donation:
https://www.irm.org/in-the-news/fundraiser-launched-to-save-milwaukee-road-126/
I don't recommend you use the GoFundMe link for anything but information on the car; the page "automatically" adds 15% "tip" without warning you ahead of time and it's difficult to delete some tip amount greater than 10% (you must actually type a zero amount in the box as there's no option for 'no tip'.)
As of this morning there was supposed to be a $25 limit on direct donations through the Web site. Don't let that stop you if you want to contribute more! This is a historic car in near-original state, and IRM is just the organization to do complete justice to renovating/restoring it.
Apologies for the link not being in my original post, I added the link but it didn't seem to go through. The amount issue on the donation page has been fixed.
Somehow the link didnt make it in my original post, thanks for catching that. The custom donation amount is now working on the IRM site.
Milwaukee was an innovative Railroad in as far as always trying to make the rail passenger train cheaper to operate and cheaper to passengers to travel. I thought their sleeper accomodations were equally interesting regular Pullman offerings of Roomette and Bedroom but then there was also Touralux.
Interestingly, you don't see similar experiments on Amtrak, unless they impact ridership negatively of course.
Touralux was hardly an innovation, it was the last gasp of the tourist sleeper, which was primarily a more Spartan version of an open-section sleeper. If MILW was that innovative, why didn't they consider Budd Slumbercoaches?
CSSHEGEWISCHIf MILW was that innovative, why didn't they consider Budd Slumbercoaches?
What would Budd Slumbercoaches give them that they did not already have in their exising fleet of sleepers? Although the Milwaukee leased Budd Equipment and may have bought some second hand, my impression is that they did not favor it, neither did C&NW. Perhaps it was the price? In it's early streamliner years Milwaukee thought builder cars were pricey compared to what it could build itself and they openly bragged about how much money they saved on the initial streamlined Hiawatha by building it mostly themselves vs buying from outside builders.
The 14-section Touralux cars were operated as coach with just a space charge for the upper or lower. No upgrade to first class was required. Slumbercoaches (built bt Budd) had 24 single rooms and 8 double rooms, holding 40 passengers maximum. They also operated at coach fare + a modest room charge. NYC also had 10 Sleepercoaches, configured as 16-10 and converted from 22 roomette sleepers. Both of these all-room sleepers were very different from the open section Touralux cars.
This will certainly be a fun car to walk through if/when it's all restored.
Your friendly neighborhood CNW fan.
Lord AtmoThis will certainly be a fun car to walk through if/when it's all restored.
There is one item among many I found unique to Milwaukee rail passenger cars, they always built all that wood trim around the windows on the interior? Why was that? Was it decorative looks or did it make access to the shade mechanism and window seals easier? Usually the Milwaukee would use birch for the wood. Noticed the Friends of the 261 extended the practice into some of their Budd built cars probably to make them match the Milwaukee home built cars. Rather interesting if it was just for decoration.....some definite carpentry skills required there.
Interesting! I never noticed that. Lately I've been more interested in passenger car restorations and being able to walk around inside them. I'll definitely make a note to check out the window trim if I get a chance to go inside this car.
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